Wallerstein: Antisystemic Movements: History and Dilemmas

Wallerstein, Immanuel. (1990). "Antisystemic Movements: History and Dilemmas". In S. Amin (Ed.), Transforming the revolution : social movements and the world-system (pp. 187 p.). New York: Monthly Review Press.

The Creation of Antisystemic Movements and the Debate about Strategy, 1789-1945:

Wallerstein attempts to highlight and put into historical context different social movements, and eventually prescribe a set of policies and ideals that should be adhered to by progressives in the future. “The post-1945 history of these movements can only be understood or appreciated in the context of their history as organized continuing movements. And this history must perforce start with the French Revolution” (13). This movement was the cornerstone of all successive movements, having put the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity on the global pedestal.

After the French revolution, he claims that other social movements were disorganized. For his example, he talks about the revolution of 1848. As this revolution was a broadly based proletarian uprising across Europe that was brutally crushes, Wallerstein takes the logical conclusion that social movements needed to become increasingly organized and coordinated. One could not overthrow a state without a structure to replace it. “…the primary lesson to be drawn from the experience of 1848 was the need for long-term political organization as the necessary tool with which their objectives might be achieved” (17).

Wallerstein then goes on to highlight revolutions and social movements that occurred after the revolution of 1848. These movements became increasingly socialist, though not uniformly. There were issues with the implementation of socialist movements globally, and there was specifically a rupture between socialist movements and nationalist movements. “The socialist movements were to be found largely in core countries, the nationalist movements largely in peripheral ones” (23).

Postwar Success of the Movements: Triumphs and Ambiguities:

“People resist exploitation. They resist as actively as they can, as passively as they must” (27).

He looks at the three “worlds” and claims that, in many ways, in and around the era of 1945, many antisystemic movements felt as if they had won. There had been large movements towards socialist governance throughout the globe. “…the period after 1945, in at least a majority of the countries of the world, representing at least three-quarters of the worlds’ population, the ostensible intermediate objective of nineteenth-century antisystemic movements—the coming to power either of a workers or of a popular movement—had in fact occurred” (33).

“To be antisystemic is to argue that neither liberty or equality is possible under the existing system and that both are possible only in a transformed world” (36).

“Let us therefore sum up the experience of the post-1945 coming to power of the movements. Each kind of movement put into effect some very great reforms which have earned them substantial popular support. There were some great changes of which the movements could boast and whose consequences were visible. At the same time, despite initial advances in social equality, political liberty, and international solidarity, in the long run, the movements disappointed, and disappointed greatly…” (38).

Forward to What? The Debate on Strategy Reopened:

He highlights some of the important movements post WWII that have shown themselves to be antisystemic, but wonders where we are really going. 1968 represented a year in which a new wave of antisystemic movements erupted. He posits that we need to think about both long-term and short-term strategies.

Agenda for the Movements:

“The lesson of 1848 was that spontaneous uprisings were not viable as a path of serious social or national revolution. Social transformation requires social organization. It was out of this lesson that the ‘old’ antisystemic movements were born. We have argued that 1968 marked the emergence of ‘new’ antisystemic movements that were protesting against the successes (that we see as failures) of the ‘old’ antisystemic movements” (48).

He sees four things that must happen: repolitization of the base, reconceptualization of the understanding of transformation in society, bring together diverse movements in a “family”, and, the “deghettoization” of social movements (48-53).

Gramsci: Selections from the Prison Notebooks (pp. 245-76)

Gramsci, A., Hoare, Q., & Nowell-Smith, G. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. London,: Lawrence & Wishart.

“…there exists an art as well as a science of politics" (251).

Gramsci begins this brief selection from Selections From the Prison Notebooks by making a comment about separations of powers: “…is a product of the struggle between civil society and political society in a specific historical period. This period is characterized by a certain unstable equilibrium between the classes, which is a result of the fact that certain categories of intellectuals…are still too closely tied to the old dominant classes” (245).

The process of socialization, or the important power of ideas, is one feature that shapes Gramsci’s thought. “If every State tends to create and maintain a certain type of civilization and of citizen…and to eliminate certain customs and attitudes and to disseminate others, then the Law will be its instrument for this purpose” (246).

The State is controlled by those who are in power in civil society. “In reality, the State must be conceived of as an ‘educator’, in as much as it tends precisely to create a new type or level of civilization” (247). The power is exerted, when it can be, through socialization. When it can not be, it is imposed by Law. “The Law is the repressive and negative aspect of the entire positive, civilizing activity undertaken by the State” (247).

“Political intuition is not expressed through the artist, but through the ‘leader’; and ‘intuition’ must be understood to mean not ‘knowledge of men’, but swiftness in connecting seemingly disparate facts, and in conceiving the means adequate to particular ends—thus discovering the interests involved, and arousing the passions of men and directing them towards a particular action” (252). Power is not crude deployment of material resource, but rather though ideational influence.

The Ethical State: “…every State is ethical in as much as one of its most important functions is to raise the great mass of the population to a particular cultural and moral level, a level…which corresponds to the needs of the productive forces for development, and hence to the interests of the ruling classes” (258).

Ability of a group to have influence in society without having to take the power of the state is Gramscian hegemony. “State = political society + civil society, in other words, hegemony protected by the armour of coercion” (263).

“The expressions ‘ethical State’ or ‘civil society’ would thus mean that this ‘image’ o fa Satat without a State was present to the greatest political and legal thinkers, in so far as they placed themselves on the terrain of pure science…” (263).

“A totalitarian policy is aimed precisely: 1. at ensuring that the members of a particular party find in that party all the satisfaction that they formerly found in a multiplicity of organizations, i.e. at breaking all the threads that bind these members to extraneous cultural organisms; 2. at destroying all other organizations or at incorporating them into a system of which the party is the sole regulator. This occurs: 1. when the given party is the bearer of a new culture—then one has a progressive phase; 2. when the given party wishes to prevent another force, bearer of a new culture, from becoming itself ‘totalitarianism’—then one has an objectively regressive and reactionary phase, even if that reaction (as invariably happens) does not avow itself, and seeks itself to appear as a bearer of a new culture” (265).

“..hegemony and dictatorship are indistinguishable, force and consent are simply equivalent; one cannot distinguish political society from civil society; only the State, and of course the State-as-government, exists, etc” (271).

Lenin: State and Revolution

Lenin, Vladimir Il Ich. (1935). State and revolution, Marxist teaching about the theory of the state and the tasks of the proletariat in the revolution. New York,: International publishers.

Originally written in 1917, this text has done much to formulate an orthodox Marxist interpretation of the state, and the transition from capitalist society to communist society. The text deals explicitly with Engle’s formulation of the “withering away of the state” and attempts to resuscitate its understanding from the jaws of critics of Marxism.

Firstly, Lenin must define and describe what characterizes a state. “The state is the product and the manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises when, where, and to the extent that the class antagonisms cannot be objectively reconciled” (8 emphasis in original). The state is the mediator of class difference and class tension. In the bourgeois-democratic state of Lenin’s time, the state was also, “an organ of domination of a definite class which cannot be reconciled with its antipode” (9 emphasis in original).

The state must have a territory. It also must have an aspect of armed power. “Engles develops the conception of that ‘power’ which is termed the state—a power arising from society, but placing itself above it and becoming more and more separate from it. What does this power mainly consist of? It consists of special bodies of armed men who have at their disposal prisons, etc.” (10).

“In the Communist Manifesto are summed up the general lessons of history, which force us to see in the state the organ of class domination, and lead us to the inevitable conclusion that the proletariat cannot overthrow the bourgeoisie without first conquering political power, without obtaining political rule, without transforming the state into the ‘proletariat organized as the ruling class’; and that this proletarian state will begin to wither away immediately after its victory, because in a society without class antagonisms, the state is unnecessary and impossible” (25 emphasis in original).

“A Marxist is one who extends the acceptance of class struggle to the acceptance of the dictatorship of the proletariat” (30 emphasis in original).

“The forms of bourgeois states are exceedingly variegated, but their essence is the same: in one way or another, all these states are in the last analysis inevitably a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The transition from capitalism to Communism will certainly bring a great variety and abundance of political forms, but the essence will inevitably be only one: the dictatorship of the proletariat” (31).

This transition is directly tied to the concept of democracy, which Lenin goes on to describe as true equality. “Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich—that is the democracy of capitalist society” (72). “Marx splendidly grasped the essence of capitalist democracy, when, in analyzing the experience of the Commune, he said that the oppressed were allowed, once every few years, to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class should be in parliament to represent and repress them!” (73). It only becomes possible to truly address the concept of freedom in Lenin’s construction through the withering of the state.

“The replacement of the bourgeois by the proletarian state is impossible without a violent revolution. The abolition of the proletarian state, i.e., of all states, is only possible through ‘withering away’ (20 emphasis in original).

The first phase of Communist society, a society that is described as “coming out of the womb of capitalism” (76), involves the transition of the means of production out of the hands of private interests and into the hands of the multitude. However, equality will be difficult to achieve, as different people produce differently and have different needs. “The state will wither away completely [and the higher phase of Communist society will be achieved] when society has realized the rule: ‘From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs’” (79). Socialism can be called the lower phase of development and Communism for the higher phase.